With everything cut to size, next step was sanding down all edges to make sure nobody would sit on a splinter.
Unfortunately the electric sander also proved unpopular with neighbours, so I hand-sanded 40-odd planks 😅
Then it was a case of waiting for optimal painting weather.
The weather arrived, so next up was waterproofing all of the table-top slats.
The shorter, squatter pieces for table legs etc were a bit trickier: with time at a premium, how do you paint all six faces of a block of wood in one go?
Turns out there's a genius method: paint one face, then rest on the ends of a few screws, then paint the other 5. All done 🙌
So, everything painted, dried and ready to assemble 😀
Next up, power drill time, and everything starts to look a little less like a pile of wood and more like something that might become a table
Now with added legs:
And then table-topping time. Turns out a set of cutlery was perfect for spacing out the slats 😅
Table top secured:
Et voila. A pretty sick garden table and benches, if I say so myself. Here's to a summer of working, eating and drinking outdoors
For all the talk of a general fall in births, the drop is overwhelmingly driven by people on the left having fewer kids.
By ceding the topic of family and children to the right, progressives risk ushering in a more conservative world.
There’s something of a paradox at play here.
On the one hand, pro-natalism often implies constraining individual liberty and setting back women’s progress. As such, the left’s aversion to worrying about birth rates is perfectly natural.
But: the consequence of this emerging ideological slant in birth rates is that each successive generation gets nudged rightwards, increasing the likelihood that conservative politicians (who want to constrain individual liberty and set back women’s progress) get elected.
NEW: Is the internet changing our personalities for the worse?
Conscientiousness and extroversion are down, neuroticism up, with young adults leading the charge.
This is a really consequential shift, and there’s a lot going on here, so let’s get into the weeds 🧵
First up, personality analysis can feel vague, and you might well ask why it even matters?
On the first of those, the finding of distinct personality traits is robust. This field of research has been around for decades and holds up pretty well, even across cultures.
On the second, studies consistently find personality shapes life outcomes.
In fact, personality traits — esp conscientiousness and neuroticism — are stronger predictors of career success, divorce and mortality than someone’s socio-economic background or cognitive abilities.
There’s been a lot of discussion lately about rising graduate unemployment.
I dug a little closer and a striking story emerged:
Unemployment is climbing among young graduate *men*, but college-educated young women are generally doing okay.
In fact, young men with a college degree now have the same unemployment rate as young men who didn’t go to college, completely erasing the graduate employment premium.
Whereas a healthy premium remains for young women.
What’s going on?
At first glance, this looks like a case of the growing masses of male computer science graduates being uniquely exposed to the rapid adoption of generative AI in the tech sector, and finding jobs harder to come by than earlier cohorts.
The number of people travelling from Europe to the US in recent weeks has plummeted by as much as 35%, as travellers have cancelled plans in response to Trump’s policies and rhetoric, and horror stories from the border.
Denmark saw one of the steepest declines, in an indication that anger over Trump’s hostility towards Greenland may be contributing to the steep drop-off in visitor numbers.
Corporate quotes are usually pretty dry, but the co-founder of major travel website Kayak wasn’t mincing his words: